


with a loaded gun and a steady hand

by sinnabar (fishtank)



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Experimental, Gen, Zombies, vague attempts at postmodernism??
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-02
Updated: 2016-02-02
Packaged: 2018-05-17 22:20:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5887492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fishtank/pseuds/sinnabar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>Jackie Denardo has been on the TV for the last five minutes, and nobody has made a single comment about her breasts. That’s how Dee knows some serious shit is going down.</em> The Gang fights a zombie apocalypse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	with a loaded gun and a steady hand

**Author's Note:**

> I have no earthly idea where it's coming from, but I seem to be on a fic-writing roll atm. Also, I can only apologize if you clicked on this hoping for a fun Sunny/zombie movie parody-mashup, because this is almost entirely bleak and depressing. Content warnings for character death, self harm, discussion of suicide and passing mention of dissociative episodes, as well as the usual violence and gore that goes along with the zombie apocalypse trope. Both macdennis and dennis/dee are alluded to, though no more than they already are in canon.
> 
> Title is from "Aim For The Head" by Creature Feature.

**day 0**

Jackie Denardo has been on the TV for the last five minutes, and nobody has made a single comment about her breasts. That’s how Dee knows some serious shit is going down.

_“The World Health Organization has put out an official bulletin,”_ Jackie is saying. She seems uncharacteristically frazzled; there’s a button missing on her blouse, and her hair is slipping out of its neat bun. It looks as though she’s on location at a shopping mall somewhere, and there’s a crowd of maybe a hundred or so people pressed outside the window behind her, pawing at the glass.

_“It seems – and I can’t believe I’m saying this – it seems that the recently deceased have somehow risen up and are attacking the living. The advice from the government is that everybody should stay indoors, preferably in a secure location, and make no attempt to reach loved ones. The threat can be neutralized by removing the head or destroying the brain, but it’s stressed that you should try to avoid engaging with them unless you have no other choice.”_

“This is a joke, right?” Dee says. Dennis shushes her, flapping a hand in her direction without even taking his eyes off the screen, but she gets her answer anyway; on the TV, the glass of the mall window shatters, and the horde of people outside surges forwards. Jackie screams; the camera angle tilts wildly, and the broadcast cuts out, filling the screen with static.

“Holy shit,” Frank exclaims into the stunned silence that follows.

“It’s the end of days,” Mac says in a soft, awed voice, making the sign of the cross over his chest.

_Amen,_ Dee thinks.

\--

**day 3**

The trouble with barricading themselves inside the bar is that, while it might protect them from the grade-A shitstorm going on outside, there’s still a good chance they might well just end up killing each other anyway. Dennis has already threatened to gag Mac and lock him in the men’s room if he mentions the Book of Revelation one more goddamn time, and Frank seems to be well on his way to losing whatever’s left of his mind.

Dee still isn’t entirely convinced that the whole thing isn’t just some elaborate hoax, but she’s not quite confident enough in that theory to leave the relative security of Paddy’s and find out for herself.

“Uh, I don’t wanna alarm anyone,” Charlie says, with a freaked-out look that means he’s going to go right ahead and do it anyway, “but I think there’s a zombie in the emergency bunker.”

“Could we _not_ call them that?” Dee snaps. Charlie blinks at her once – slowly, like she’s being exceptionally stupid, which she takes offence to.

“Why not? It’s what they are.”

“Because this is real life, Charlie, not some goddamn horror B-movie!”

“Yeah, I gotta say, I’m with Dee on this one,” Dennis chimes in. “Whatever you think you heard, it’s probably just the rats. Or Cricket.”

Dee grabs a shovel from the stockpile of makeshift weapons they’ve managed to gather together – which otherwise consists of the two handguns Frank happened to have on his person, Charlie’s rat-bashing stick, and the only knife in the bar that might be sharp enough to inflict damage – and heads down to the bunker, intent on settling the matter once and for all. The guys all follow, though she notices that none of them are volunteering to go first. _Pussies._

She can definitely hear s _omething_ shuffling around in the darkness when she pushes open the door, and it sounds considerably larger than a rat.

“Cricket?” She calls, reflexively tightening her grip on the handle of the shovel. “Is that you?”

In response, she gets a soft groan, and a vague person-shape emerges from the shadows. It’s Cricket alright, but as he draws closer it becomes apparent that he’s no longer among the living. His face looks gray and waxy even in the dim light, and there’s a festering bite-shaped wound on his shoulder.

“I told you!” Charlie shrieks from behind her, while Mac lets out a decidedly unmanly squeak of terror and shoves Dee forwards. Not-Cricket lunges for her, and Dee reacts on pure instinct: she swings the shovel, and the sharp metal edge connects with the side of his head. There’s a sickening crunch of bone, a spray of gore, and Cricket drops.

“Did you bitches see that?!” Dee crows.

“Nicely done, Deandra,” Frank says, and sounds like he actually means it. Charlie is grinning at her, and Mac is muttering that he could’ve done the same but even he looks a little bit impressed, and Dennis – Dennis is looking at Dee with an expression of awe and disbelief, like he’s seeing her, really seeing _her,_ for the first time in who knows how long.

Dee’s heart is in her throat, a steady, reassuring thrum, and she feels vital and _alive_ , like maybe this is exactly where she’s supposed to be.

\--

**day 5**

They’re quickly running out of food and supplies, and it’s become apparent that it’s not really feasible for them to stay at Paddy’s much longer. The difficulty is actually coming to some kind of consensus on what they should do next. Charlie wants to rescue the Waitress, which is quickly shot down by just about everybody else. Dennis, meanwhile, is in favor of rounding up some hot chicks and “going out with a bang” – his actual words, which he punctuates by waggling his eyebrows and leering at Mac. Dee points out that the only person that’s going to benefit is him, and maybe Frank if the girls are desperate enough, and if it’s the end of the world then she’d rather not spend it at some sleazy sex party, thanks.

“Fine, no chicks,” Dennis eventually relents after ten minutes of heated debate, “but we’re going to our apartment. That’s non-negotiable.”

That’s actually fine by Dee, since Mac and Dennis’s place is not only the nearest to the bar, but also considerably bigger than her own, but she makes a show of being annoyed for Dennis’s benefit.

“Wait, you’re not even gonna _consider_ my apartment?” Charlie asks. “Me and Frank have got a pretty sweet deal going on, you know.”

“No, Charlie, because I don’t want to spend what could be my last days on earth in a rat-infested hovel,” says Dennis.

“Oh, but we have no food at our place, though,” Mac joins in, like he’s only just remembering this fact now.

“Are you kidding me, dude? It was your turn to get the groceries.”

“Yeah, and it was on my to-do list, before I got distracted by the goddamn _apocalypse,_ ” Mac hisses.

“Whatever, it doesn’t matter,” Dee intervenes before they can get derailed again. “We’ll just have to swing by the Wawa on the way there to grab some supplies.”

“It’s settled then,” Dennis says, like he’s singlehandedly responsible for bringing the plan together. “We’ll head out in the morning.”

\--

**day 6**

They don’t make it to Mac and Dennis’s apartment.

Instead, they get caught off-guard by maybe a dozen or so shambling corpses as they’re raiding the Wawa. In the ensuing chaos, they lose Frank; the last Dee sees of him, he’s being grabbed from all directions by rotting hands, hollering like a maniac the entire time. There’s a flash of red and wet as his flesh splits open under all that pressure, and then Dee has to look away.

They run, Mac and Dennis dragging Charlie between them. They’re forced to abandon the car, and the four of them flee on foot until it feels like they might have put enough distance behind them, breathless and winded.

They end up breaking into an abandoned house for a place to spend the night, barricading the door with furniture. Without ever discussing it out loud, they all seem to come to a unanimous decision to stick together and sleep in the front room. Dee very deliberately avoids looking at any of the framed photographs on the shelves.

Mac and Dennis are both sleeping on one side of the room, half-propped against the wall; Dennis has his head pillowed against Mac’s shoulder, and Mac’s hand is resting lightly on Dennis’s thigh. In any other circumstances, Dee would be making fun of them. As things are, she can’t see anything remotely amusing about the situation, quietly envious of their ability to take comfort in each other.

The one she’s really worried about is Charlie. He’s barely said a word since the Wawa, and he keeps spacing out in a manner that’s frankly alarming. Currently, he’s slumped in a corner, staring off into middle distance, and it’s like he’s not really there at all.

“Want some schnapps?” Dee offers, holding out the bottle she’d pilfered from the liquor cabinet earlier. “I’ll warn you though, it tastes like ass. I guess these people had never heard of real booze.”

Charlie raises his head to stare at her dully before taking the bottle and draining about half of it in three long gulps.

“I keep thinking about Frank,” he says in a quiet, hoarse voice. Dee isn’t ready to have this conversation, doesn’t think she ever will be, but she slides down to sit next to him anyway. He smells even worse than usual, but she figures she can’t exactly be a basket of roses herself; they’re all caked in a layer of grime and blood, still wearing the same clothes they showed up to work in the day everything went to hell.

“I guess he was like, my dad or something?” Charlie continues. “I mean, he never admitted it, but we all knew…”

An ugly, petty part of Dee wants to resent him for having such a good relationship with Frank, because they might have been related by blood, but Charlie has no idea what it was like actually growing up with Frank as a father. Charlie never had to deal with Frank’s long absences, or his affairs, or his constant belittling and humiliation of his own children, and it seems wrong that he should be more affected by Frank’s death than Dee or Dennis. She wants to tell him that he doesn’t have the right.

“To Frank,” she says instead, with only a touch of bitterness, raising the schnapps bottle in a mocking toast.

“It’s too real,” Charlie whispers. His eyes are wet when he looks at her, and _fuck,_ Dee doesn’t know what she’ll do if he starts crying. She feels as though she’s just barely holding it together herself. “This whole thing. It’s like a nightmare or something, except I keep pinching myself and I can’t wake up. I just want it to _stop._ ”

Dee doesn’t know what to say to that. She settles for curling her fingers around Charlie’s bicep and squeezing the thin muscle, as though to reassure him that he’s still here, that he’s alive and so is she.

If she’s being honest with herself, she’s not entirely sure whose benefit it’s for.

Across the room, Dennis makes a quiet sound of distress and curls closer to Mac, blindly seeking out warmth and comfort. Dee suppresses a shudder as the moans outside grow louder, telling herself it’s just the wind. She’s digging her nails into Charlie’s arm hard enough that it has to hurt, but he doesn’t complain.

He doesn’t say anything at all.

\--

**day 9**

“Jesus Christ, dude, how is this taking so long? I thought you knew what you were doing.”

“I _do_ know what I’m doing, just shut up and let me work. This is an art, okay, you can’t rush me.”

Dee rolls her shoulders and adjusts her grip on the shovel, scanning the horizon for any sign of movement. She and Charlie are standing guard while Mac attempts to hotwire a car; Dennis’s job mostly seems to consist of bitching from the passenger seat.

She thinks uncharitably that their odds of survival might be better if Mac was actually a hardened criminal like his father and not just a small-time petty crook with delusions of importance, but they make do with what they’ve got. Even if their skillsets before the end of the world mostly consisted of drinking and fucking up their lives.

“Dee…” Charlie warns, his voice low and urgent, and she snaps her thoughts back to the present. She hears them before she sees them: the telltale groan, the halting gait, and then the frontrunners start to appear out of the trees, one after another after another.

It’s the most they’ve encountered at any one time up until now.  There’s still time for them to make a clean getaway, but it has to be soon.

“We need this goddamn car started two minutes ago.”

“I’m working as fast as I can, Dee, you wanna climb out of my ass already?” Mac snaps back. The first wave of the dead is approaching fast, and Dee is bracing herself to fight when the car suddenly roars to life behind her. The rumble of the engine is music to her ears, and even Mac’s gloating doesn’t seem quite as irritating as it would on any other occasion.

“Charlie, let’s go!” she yells, and only realizes when her hand is already on the car door that something isn’t right. Charlie is stood stock-still, staring at the oncoming horde, eyes fixed and breathing heavily in a way that suggests a major freak-out is imminent.

“Come on, we gotta move,” she tries again. Some of them are close enough now that she can pick out individual features; sunken eyes in rotting faces, gaping holes where mouths should be. Another twenty seconds, and they’re dead for sure.

Dennis is screaming for them to get in the fucking car already, and Dee makes an abortive grab for Charlie’s arm; he shrugs her off to charge headlong into the herd, brandishing his rat-stick and raving about Frank. Dee tries to see where he goes, but he’s swallowed up in the crowd almost instantly, and the next thing she knows Dennis is grabbing her from behind, hauling her back to the car and throwing her into the backseat even as she thrashes and kicks and shrieks for him to _put me down, goddammit, you son of a bitch!_

“What are you waiting for, Mac, get us the hell out of here!” Dennis snarls as he climbs back into the car, wild-eyed.

“We’re not leaving without Charlie,” Mac says, staring at Dennis like he’s never seen him before, and Dee thinks that it’s a hell of a time for him to start taking her side.

“Oh, for – listen to me, both of you. I’m sorry, but we can’t help Charlie now, okay? There is literally nothing we can do for him, but if we don’t get out of here now, we’re all dead, do you hear me? We are fucking dead, so for the love of God, Mac, just _drive!”_

“Goddammit. God _dammit!”_ Mac yells, smacking the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. The first grasping fingers reach the windows, trying to find a way inside, and that effectively makes the decision for him. Mac hits the accelerator and peels out of the driveway, cursing and apologizing to God and Charlie the entire time.

Dee forces herself not to look back.

\--

**day 10**

“He could still be alive out there. I mean, we didn’t see…”

She can’t bring herself to finish that sentence. In truth, she’s not sure which would be the kinder alternative. The thought of Charlie out there alone somewhere, knowing they left him behind, makes her ache in a way she hadn’t known she was capable of.

“Yeah, I’m sure he’s just fine,” Dennis says acidly. He’s pacing up and down like a caged animal, and it would almost be frightening if Dee hadn’t already had a lifetime to get used to her brother’s erratic behavior, if there weren’t so many other things to be frightened of these days. “He ran straight into a hundred-strong crowd of zombies like a goddamn lunatic, but sure, he’s still alive.”

She doesn’t bother to admonish him for his use of the z-word, because what would be the fucking point?

“Maybe if we hadn’t left him behind –“

“Oh, don’t you do that!” Dennis interrupts. He looks livid, like he’d be in a full-on screaming rage right now if they weren’t deliberately trying to keep their voices down. “Don’t you put this all on me, make me out to be the bad guy. Somebody had to step up and take control, and I saved all of our lives. You’re both welcome, by the way.”

Dee looks to Mac for support, because he might be an asshole but he’s an asshole who loves Charlie as much as any of them, but it soon becomes clear that Mac isn’t even paying attention. He’s rocking back and forth, muttering under his breath, and it takes Dee a second to realize that he’s praying, over and over again.

“Would you cut that out,” she hisses, because it honestly makes her hair stand on end. She never had time for all of his God bullshit before; now it just seems unnecessarily creepy.

“Eat a dick, Dee,” Mac retorts, and it’s almost normal except for the fact that he sounds as though he’s reciting his lines by rote, and he goes straight back to his chanting as if the interruption hadn’t happened at all.

_“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen. Hail Mary, full of grace…”_

\--

**day 17**

Mac collapses twenty miles shy of Pittsburgh.

He’s been slowing them down for a while now in a way that’s been making Dee faintly nervous; the car finally ran out of gas three days ago, and they’ve been moving on foot ever since. She’s always known that Mac is grossly unfit, but he’s no worse than Dennis, who has been keeping the pace with the grim determination of a man possessed.

“What the hell is your problem?” he demands when Mac faceplants into the dirt, but it doesn’t matter, because Dee has already seen everything she needs to see.

“Goddammit, Mac,” she mutters, and yanks his shirt up before he can stop her, revealing the ugly, crescent-shaped wound above his hip. The skin around the area looks inflamed and angry, streaked with livid red veins. Infected.

They all know what a bite looks like.

“What the hell is that?” she asks anyway, releasing her grip on Mac’s shirt. He makes no effort to get back up to his feet, just blinks up at them from his position sprawled on the ground, glassy-eyed and feverish, and Dee wonders how the hell they could have missed the signs.

“You know that last house we hit up? One of them took me by surprise in the yard while you guys were checking upstairs.” He laughs shakily, rakes a hand through his hair. “I bashed his head in, but not before the fucker took a bite right outta me. Shit.”

“What the _fuck,_ dude?!” Dennis explodes. “When were you planning on telling us about this, exactly? Or were you just gonna keep it to yourself, hope it all goes away? You goddamn coward.”

“I was gonna tell you, I swear!” Mac insists, “I just didn’t know – Look, we don’t know for sure, right? About the bites? We’re just assuming, ‘cause of the movies and shit.”

He bites his lip and widens his eyes the way he always does when he’s trying to garner sympathy; Dee thinks it would be more effective if he wasn’t flushed and sweaty with two weeks of beard growth and greasy hair hanging in his face, but whatever. Dennis apparently feels the same way, because he snarls and whips the gun out of the waistband of his jeans, aiming it directly at Mac’s head.

“Whoa!” Dee takes a halting step forward as Mac yelps and cowers on the ground. She’s seen Dennis lose it before, they both have, but this is a whole new level of crazy and she has no idea how to defuse the situation. “Dennis, what the hell are you thinking? Have you lost your goddamn mind?”

“I’m thinking I should pull the trigger and put him out of his misery before he turns and kills us both in our sleep, that’s what I’m thinking.”

“Come on, Den,” Mac pleads pathetically. “We’re blood brothers, remember? You don’t wanna shoot me.”

“He does have a point, we don’t know for sure,” Dee says. She knows not one of them believe it for a goddamn second, but she’s willing to say whatever it takes if it’ll get Dennis to stop waving the gun around. “And he’s not dead yet. Three pairs of eyes are still better than two, and we can watch him, make sure he doesn’t catch us off-guard.”

_And he’s your best friend, and I know you say you don’t have feelings but if you pull that trigger I’m not sure you’ll ever come back,_ she doesn’t say.

“I’m sorry,” Mac says – and he’s crying now, really crying, ugly, desperate sobs that rack his whole body. “Dennis, I’m sorry. Please.”

After several more agonizing seconds that seem to last an eternity, Dennis lowers the gun, and Dee lets out a breath she hadn’t even known she was holding.

“You asshole,” Dennis chokes out, and suddenly Dee gets the suspicion that his whole freak-out wasn’t so much about Mac being the coward that he is and putting them all in danger as it was about Mac having the audacity to get himself killed and leave Dennis behind.

Some things never change.

\--

**day 19**

“I don’t wanna come back,” Mac says.

It’s the most lucid he’s been in hours. He’d gone downhill fast after the initial revelation, delirious with fever and ranting about God and Hell and other shit that didn’t even make any sense half the time, and Dee and Dennis had ended up half-dragging, half-carrying him to the empty church they’re currently taking refuge in. He still looks awful, pale and shaking, huddled in one of the pews, but at least he’s talking in coherent sentences now.

The religious setting makes Dee uneasy, but she thinks it’s fitting, given the circumstances.

“I mean it. When… when I die, you gotta shoot me in the head, so I don’t turn into one of them. I can’t do it myself. Suicide, that’s like – that’s like a one-way ticket to Hell.”

Dee wants to scoff at that. She wants to say that if Mac is going to Hell, it won’t be because he puts a bullet in his brain or because he likes sucking cock, it’ll be because he’s an awful human being who’s spent his entire life dicking people over, but that seems too cruel even for her. The man is dying – it seems kinder to just let him cling to his delusions for however long he has left.

“Promise me, Dennis,” Mac insists.

“Fine, I promise,” Dennis says tightly. “Now shut up and rest.”

They spend the next few hours in silence, listening to Mac’s breathing getting worse and worse until he suddenly starts wheezing and gasping like he can’t get enough air and Dee thinks, _this is it._ She helps him sit upright, and he squeezes her hand so tightly she could swear she hears her bones grinding together. Dennis crouches in front of them, holding Mac’s face in his hands and shushing him gently, and Dee doesn’t want to bear witness to this but she can’t make herself look away.

“Den,” Mac says, and he’s staring at Dennis’s face like he’s trying to commit it to memory, like it’s the last thing he’ll ever see. “Dennis, I…”

He never gets the next words out, stubborn to the last. Instead, he dissolves into another coughing fit, convulsing and heaving and choking on his own blood, until suddenly it’s over as quickly as it began and he goes still, slumping back against Dee.

Mac dies in a dusty church, twenty-three minutes before the clock strikes midnight. Dennis honors his last request, and Dee prizes the gun from her brother’s shaking fingers when the deed is done.

\--

**day 22**

Losing Mac is somehow different again to losing Charlie, to losing Frank. Mac has always been their fire, their driving energy, their man-with-the-plan, even if most of his plans were idiotic, and Dee hadn’t appreciated just how quiet, how _still_ things would be without him. She and Dennis are rudderless, directionless, cast adrift in a sea of the dead, moving aimlessly from place to place with no fixed goal in mind other than surviving another day.

Dennis takes to burning his fingertips with a lighter, over and over again until they’re blistered and raw. “As long as I can feel it, I know I’m still alive,” he explains.

It’s one of those things Dennis comes out with sometimes that shouldn’t make any sense, except for how there are worrying gaps in Dee’s memory and there’s always blood under her fingernails now, and they both look half-dead already, emaciated and hollow behind the eyes.

At night, they sleep curled tightly into one another, the way they used to do as children, a tangle of limbs with their heads tucked together in the center to keep out the rest of the world. If it borders on inappropriate now that they’re adults, it’s not like there’s anyone left to judge. Dee lies awake with Dennis pressed up against her, listens to the steady thump of her twin’s heartbeat as it synchronizes with her own, and tells herself: _we’re alive._

\--

**day 27**

“Hey,” Dennis says, and it startles her because he rarely speaks anymore unless it’s out of necessity. It takes her a second to realize he’s holding the gun in his hands, studying it thoughtfully.

“Three bullets left,” he continues. “I was thinking, maybe we should save the last two. You know, for us.”

He sounds like he’s quoting from some movie, playing the part of the cynical anti-hero in one of those stupid horror flicks that Mac and Charlie used to watch, like if he just sticks to the script then he can still control the way things end. Dee wants to tell him he’s got it all wrong: Dennis isn’t the hero, he’s the villain, and maybe this is exactly what they deserve.

She decides to humor him and play along instead. It’s a nice fantasy, if nothing else.

“You don’t think Mac was right, about…” she pantomimes putting a gun to her head. She’s never been one for religion, and it wouldn’t even be her first suicide attempt – she attended that particular rodeo back while she was still in college – but something about it seems more final this time around. Nothing in her life up until this point feels quite real, like maybe things have always been this way, and somehow that’s the most unsettling aspect of the whole situation.

“Mac doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Dennis says. Dee doesn’t bother to correct him on his use of the present tense. “Besides, I figure if there is a Hell, you and me are already headed there.”

His lips twist into something that might have approximated a smile, once upon a time. Dee thinks that sometimes she and Dennis are more alike than either of them would ever want to admit, two sides of the same irreversibly fucked-up coin.

\--

**day 31**

If this was a movie, Dee thinks, if they were the heroes, they’d end up getting rescued by the military at the last possible second, or Charlie would reappear out of nowhere for a bittersweet reunion, or they’d at least go down in a blaze of glory, taking as many undead assholes with them as they could.

Instead, what happens is this:

They wind up getting trapped in an office building, three floors up, cut off by the horde from all directions. They fight their way through as many as they can, and then they lock themselves in a supply closet. The dead know they’re in here, scratching relentlessly at the door; they don’t give up, and it’s only a matter of time before they break through.

Dennis used all three bullets after all. There’s nothing left to do now but wait.

“Looks like this is it for us, babygirl,” Dennis says. He’s trying for flippant but his voice is shaking. Then he adds, quieter: “Do you think it all just… _ends?_ ”

“I don’t know,” Dee admits. “Probably.” The truth is she’s never put much thought into it, but she knows she doesn’t believe in any kind of afterlife.

“I think I could be okay with that,” Dennis muses. “An eternity of nothing sounds pretty good right about now.”

Dee isn’t sure she agrees, but she thinks it seems right that they should go out of the world the same way they came into it: together, their fates entwined from the first to the last.

“See you on the other side then,” she quips. “Or not, I guess.”

She reaches for her brother’s hand in the dark – his skin isn’t soft anymore, callused and scarred, but it’s still more familiar than anything else in the world, a mirror image to her own.

Dee laces their fingers together, and holds on, and waits.

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah so, this was. an experiment. I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about it; mostly I just wanted to drop the gang, with all their neuroses and twisted relationship dynamics, into a zombie apocalypse setting while playing every other trope pretty much straight, and this is what came out.
> 
> Also, I'm an ignorant Brit who knows next to nothing about the geography of Pennsylvania, or anywhere else in the US for that matter. Apologies.


End file.
